As previously reported, the Galaxy S III Mini packs in a 1GHz dual-core processor, 4" WVGA Super AMOLED display, a 5MP rear-facing camera (VGA front-facing camera for video conferencing), and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The smartphone will come with a 1,500 mAh battery and includes FM radio support. One big omission, however, is LTE connectivity.

Compared to the powerhouse Galaxy S III, its little brother is definitely not quite up to par.

“The GALAXY S III introduced a new concept of smartphone that has proven hugely popular around the world. We’re now delighted to bring its revolutionary design, intuitive usability and intelligence to the GALAXY S III mini in a more compact form,” said JK Shin, President and Head of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics. “We continue to make every effort to provide extraordinary mobile experiences to meet a wide variety of user needs.”

It's "diluting the brand" in that people will see "Galaxy S III", buy the crippled Mini, have a lousy experience, and declare to their friends that the "GS3 suxx, Imma get an iPhone."

Though to be fair, Android's had this problem for a while with low-end phones clouding the image of the better ones.

"Android sucks, man, I'm getting an iPhone.""What phone do you have?"some terrible bargain-bin 480x320 Android device"Dude, you can't really compare a $100 prepaid Android to a $600 iPhone.""I'm getting the one with more GBs!"

Well you guys are building an argument around consumer ignorance. Not sure that's a good position personally. If people spend their money carelessly without understanding their purchase, it's hard for me to sympathize with them.

But lousy experience? If Jelly Bean is silky smooth on an old Nexus, I doubt the experience will be lousy just because the hardware isn't equal to an iPhone.

Samsung can do no wrong at this point. Even the Note, which people called a joke, has been a pretty respectable seller. So we'll just have to see if the 'mini' proves to be worth it.

quote: Well you guys are building an argument around consumer ignorance. Not sure that's a good position personally. If people spend their money carelessly without understanding their purchase, it's hard for me to sympathize with them.

It's not about sympathizing with the ignorant customer, it's the customer experience that dictates future mobile os preference and unjustly hurts, in this case, the Android brand. this device may not fall in to that group. Time will tell but my first Android was a Motorola Backflip that launched with 1.5 Doughnut and had a clock speed of 500Mhz. It was a very sad experience. The stock motoblur experience was notoriously plagued with the inability to slide to answer at least 90% of the time. I am not entirely sure if this was hardware or software related, but if memory serves me right Moto had to patch this with an Answer and Decline button. An experience like this could quickly change an Apple customers mind if they made the jump. The problem is they were ignorant and they blame Android so Google has lost a customer for life.

As a fairly clued-up consumer who was curious about Android, actually the biggest thing which led to me dumping the Galaxy 3 and going to get an iPhone 5 is that it seemed like a trade off whereby you could either get a stock Android device, a Nexus, where you got regular updates, or you went with a phone where Samsung/HTC add extra features to the stock OS, some of which are worth having, most of which are not. The ability to use the phone as a mass storage device was good, until it came to putting music on it whereby drag and dropping loads of music files onto it into separate folders quickly became annoying after the ease of use of iTunes over many years.

Samsung would have a better consumer experience if their devices were better built, eschewing the use of cheap materials and if the screens were better. I'm all in favour of a big screen, but not one which is fuzzy and greeny/blue tinted. Camera is similarly hobbled:Able to take pictures really fast (almost instantly) but with quality which does not stand upto scrutiny.

I don't blame Android here, I really like the OS itself, I just think that there are parts which really do need to be polished up a bit if they really want to tempt more people away from iPhone, which does still excel at user friendliness. I use the Nexus 7 and like it for certain use cases (e.g. cached maps for travelling) though Apps choice are still very lacking compared to iOS.

The G3 in this article is simply a continuation of the Galaxy Ace et al. which are the cost proposition line, and it has to be thicker because it doesn't have such a large surface area to put the battery in. I'm sure there will be plenty of Android devices which will be worse than this, and the worst that could really happen is Samsung's brand is hurt, not Android's